Tag: Narrative

They wouldn’t need much, would they? A few small fish, an arrangement of figs. A little paper. A handful of words. —Carole Maso [i]

In her poem “The Invitation,” Oriah Mountain Dreamer reminds us:

It doesn’t interest me

what you do for a living.

I want to know

what you ache for

and if you dare to dream

of meeting your heart’s longing [ii]

Longing can be defined as “yearning desire.” Desire is a strong feeling of wanting or wishing to possess something. Needs are essentials or very important for survival. You need food, water, and sleep, but your desires can be much broader. In many cases, our wildest desires are extinguished when we become adults—as we’re taught the value of practicality. But as writers, allowing ourselves to acknowledge unrealistic desires can be fruitful for our work. Maybe you want to write the next Pulitzer-prize winner, Surrealist manifesto, or bestselling young adult novel. What’s holding you back from allowing yourself to acknowledge your desires? Writers have to want and desire to write, just as doctors have a want and desire to help people and patients desire to retain their freedom and well being. Dutch philosopher, Erasmus says, “The desire to write grows with writing.”

Ask yourself:

What is it that you want to write?

What is it that you need to write?

Do you know the difference? [iii]

How does this drive you?

 

You may have difficulty sensing the nuanced differences between what you want, need, and desire to write, but recognizing those subtleties can lead to more precise writing. If you have no desire to write fiction, but rather a hybrid memoir or essay, go for it. In an interview with Carole Maso, Brian Evenson (Rain Taxi, December 3, 1997) discusses the connection Maso has in her work between language and desire, the two intermingling in often-unpredictable ways. She reflects on an essay she wrote called, “Except Joy” (in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Fall 1998) “on the notions of language as heat and light, motion and stillness, a vibrant living thing capable of containing great emotion. Also, fluid, shifting, elusive, fugitive, and ultimately outside one’s grasp. Shapes the silence and darkness keep taking back. Bodies that make fragile, amorphous, beautiful shapes for a moment and then are gone.”

Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? It’s a simple tool used to illustrate the progression from basic to complex needs:

1) Physiologic needs such as air, food, water, shelter, sanitation, touch.

2) Safety needs such as security of body, employment, resources, morality, family, health, and property.

3) Love and belonging needs such as sexual intimacy and relatedness with family and friends.

4) Esteem needs such as confidence and respect of others.

Once basic needs are met, people seek emotional evolution. At the top of the hierarchy is self-actualization, which, according to Maslow, is “the process of growing and developing as a person to achieve individual potential.” Self-actualization includes creativity, spontaneity, and lack of prejudice.

Make a list of your writing needs and desires. Let yourself go—don’t be afraid of seeming unrealistic. Let yourself think about publishing in Best American Essays or writing a feature article for a national or international publication. Categorize your list into your creative life’s emotional, physical, spiritual, and mental needs. Think about why each listed item is important to you. What basic needs and wants are most vital to your writing? How have your needs and desires been fulfilled by writing? What do you notice happens in your creative life when you get what you want?

By recognizing our own desires, and how they are constantly changing and evolving, we become more aware of what motivates our decisions. Laura King, professor of psychology at the University of Missouri at Columbia, notes, “Writing about topics that allow us to learn about our own needs and desires may be a way to harness the positive effects of writing.” [iv]

Every character in a story wants, needs, or desires something. Unconscious and conscious desires drive the creation of intriguing characters. Novelist Ryan Harty suggests that beginning writers use the following recipe to create more complex characters: two desires, two fears, one secret, eight very important things. [v] What does your writing or a character in your writing most want, need, or desire? How can you write those wants and desires?

How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into. —Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Consider you and your characters in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy. How do we write hunger/thirst? How do we write greed? How do we tell the difference? How do we make that difference known when we’re writing characters?

Too often we recognize desire in others—fictional characters included—and fail to turn the microscope on ourselves. Understanding your needs and desires, and the difference between them, will allow you to progress through Maslow’s hierarchy and to create more meaningful conflicts for your characters. You’ll benefit personally from becoming more aware of your longings and desires in your writing life—and your readers will sense the difference as well.

That is the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings… —F. Scott Fitzgerald

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[i] Maso, C. (1994). The American woman in the Chinese hat.

[ii] Dreamer, O. M. (1999). The Invitation. Verse 1.

[iii] Elizabeth Hunter. Retrieved May 28, 2014 from http://elizabethhunterwrites.com/about/for-writers/about-writing/wantneeddesire/

[iv] King, L. (2002). Gain without pain, expressive writing and self-regulation. In Lepore, Stephen J. (Ed). Smyth, Joshua, M. (Ed). The writing cure: How expressive writing promotes health and emotional well-being (pp. 119-134). Washington, D.C.; American Psychological Association, xii, 313 pp.

[v] Harty, R. (2011). Meet your protagonist! In Eggers, D. (Ed.). Don’t forget to write, for the secondary grades: 50 enthralling and effective writing lessons (pp. 101-102). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

 

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Debbie spent 30 years as a registered nurse. She became a certified applied poetry facilitator and journal-writing instructor in 2007. She is currently a student in the Johns Hopkins Science-Medical Writing program. Her publications have appeared in Journal of Poetry Therapy, Studies in Writing: Research on Writing Approaches in Mental Health, Women on Poetry: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing by Successful Women, Statement CLAS Journal, The Journal of the Colorado Language Arts Society, and Red Earth Review.

The only disability in life is a bad attitude.

—Scott Hamilton

We are constantly adding to the narrative of our bodies. Every bump, scrape, bruise and cut alters our physical shape—and, as our bodies transform, so too do the ways we see ourselves, others, and the world around us.

Nowhere is the profound relationship between the body and one’s perception more evident than in the writing of disabled authors, who have used their works to convey the physical and emotional struggles people with disabilities face each day. Because disabled people often lack access to public forums that able-bodied citizens take for granted, writers occupy an especially crucial voice in the disabled community. Beyond exposing the real-life struggles people with disabilities face, these authors lay bare the stereotypes and tired clichés that have long accompanied disability—with the ultimate goal of reinterpreting how disabilities impact one’s identity and creative spirit.

 

What is Disability?

Disability is defined by the World Health Organization’s website as “impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions….” Additionally, “[D]isability… reflects an interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives.”

In less strict terms, disability has been defined many different ways, and countless authors have taken to page with the goal of complicating and clarifying the term for readers.

For example, Cheryl Marie Wade—the director of Wry Crips Disabled Women’s Theater Group and solo pieces such as “A Woman with Juice”—stated in an interview that disability was a kind of “ugly beauty” that allowed her to discover the unique power of her body, which had been severely disfigured by rheumatoid arthritis. “By writing about my body and about what I call the ‘ugly beauty’ of disability, I began to like my body,” she explained. “I do mind the pain and the limitations, but I don’t hate the actual physical differences anymore.”

Likewise, in American poet Neil Marcus’ poem, “Disabled Country,” he claims that disability is far more than a physical limitation; rather, it is a fluid sense of identity, a compass by which to finds one’s place within the outside world. The poem opens with these lines:

If there was a country called disabled,
I would be from there.
I live disabled culture, eat disabled food,
Make disabled love, cry disabled tears,
Climb disabled mountains and tell disabled stories.

As the poem goes on, Marcus expands on his analogy of disabled persons living in another land and speaking another language, showing the reader precisely how difficult it is to live in a world full of and designed for able-bodied people. However, Marcus ends his poem on a hopeful note, moving away from a feeling of alienation and towards one of acceptance:

In my life’s journey
I am making myself
At home in my country

Disability and Creativity

In a testament to the body’s power to shape perception, Marcus’ poem reveals precisely how symbiotic the relationship between one’s body and one’s art truly is.

This issue is one that the author Nancy Mairs, who often writes about how multiple sclerosis (MS) has affected her body and her writing, describes perfectly in her essay, “Carnal Acts.”

Discussing a time when she was asked to speak at a small liberal-arts college regarding how she copes with MS and how this disability has helped her discover her voice as a writer, Mairs writes:

How can I yoke two such disparate subjects into a coherent presentation, without doing violence to one or the other, or both, or myself? […] To ask how I cope with multiple sclerosis suggests that I do cope. Now, ‘To cope,’ Webster’s Third tells me, is ‘to face or encounter and to find necessary expedients to overcome problems and difficulties.’

Mairs’ difficulty with this word, which assumes that disabilities are a problem that can be easily and expediently overcome, is a prime example of Marcus’ argument that disabled people live in an entirely different world than the able-bodied. Yet, rather than seeing her disability as an obstacle she must conquer to succeed, Mairs asserts that her disability and creativity are inexplicably tied together.

As for ‘finding’ my voice, the implication is that it was at one time lost or missing. But I don’t think it ever was,” she writes. “Forced by the exigencies of physical disease to embrace myself in the flesh, I couldn’t write bodiless prose. The voice is the creature of the body that produces it. I speak as a crippled woman. No body, no voice: no voice, no body.

With a life so deeply influenced by disability, the visceral power of Mairs’ prose can only come from the voice she describes here. She finishes this section with a clever nod to the connection between her MS and her writing, explaining that this voice is something she knows all the way down to her “bones.”

 

Disability and the Able-Bodied Gaze

Disabled people see their disabilities reflected in the eyes and body language of able-bodied people every day. In Dr. Temple Grandin’s book, Different Not Less, she explains this feeling in the following way:

In coping with illness, my struggles with disability ran the gamut of things I was born exposed to along with things I came into contact with later in life. I experienced feelings of inadequacy, self-doubt, worthlessness, and inferiority, anger, and sadness in the process of overcoming and working towards living a life beyond illness disability.

The desire to escape the stigma of disability is a common theme among disabled authors, as seen in the works of poets Stuart Sanderson and Linda Cronin. In Sanderson’s poem, “Maddening,” for example, he addresses an able-bodied female character on the beach:

Why can’t you see me?

I see you, in your bikini,

My eyes touching your sexy body.

Look at me! Look at me!

To you, my wheelchair is my body.

And your bodyfriend is made of muscles and oil.

I don’t mind, I understand.

But once, I would like your eyes to touch my body.
The dual desire for and avoidance of the able-bodied gaze also appears in Cronin’s “Flash Essay On: Beauty and the Beholder,” in which the poet muses about a “Spanish Romeo” who tells her name means “pretty” but refuses to look directly at her:

I want to reassure him, to say it’s all right. I have learned to accept this body that betrayed me, that continues to betray me each time another part fails. I want to tell him not to worry there is more to life than being pretty, being desired. I know the thoughts of touching my deformed joints repels him, but that’s alright because I have come to love who I am, with my curves and bends in unexpected places.

I want him to know my body is not my prison, my soul soars through life free as an águila finding more love and beauty in the faces of strangers and the eyes of loved ones than he’ll every know. (iii)

Here Cronin, like Sanderson, shows the barriers that disabled people face while, at the same time, revealing the qualities—like love, desire, sexuality—that connect human beings in a more profound and deeply spiritual way. For both authors, the true disability is this lack of connection between the authors and their abled-bodied counterparts.
Fred Rogers discusses this idea in his book, The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember. He says:

What of people who can’t feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren’t able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.

 

Writing the Disabled Narrative

James Baldwin famously wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” As these writers and authors all across the world tangle with what disability means, and as more readers face the true reality of disability, the perception of these topics will continue to change.

Anais Nin once wrote, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” The most important thing authors can do now is to share their own stories of how disability, whether temporary or permanent, has made a significant impact on their lives or the lives of others. For further inspiration, consider the writing prompts below.

Writing Prompts

• Everyone has felt on the short end of the beauty/sexual attractiveness spectrum at one time or another. Write about one of your experiences. How fair is it that one’s physical appearance is the gatekeeper to deeper relationships? Has there been a time you felt this was true?
• Regardless of whether or not you identify yourself as disabled, what do you call ugly beauty? Write about liking your body and minding the pain and limitations.
• Write about your realities, resilience, confidence, vulnerabilities, and limitless possibilities. How do you embrace a strengths perspective, focusing on what is right, rather than on what is wrong?
• Write about something you can’t feel or talk about—invisible disabilities like depression or anxiety.
• What effect does disability have on your body?
• Do you identify with having a disability or being differently abled? Write about how a congenital, developmental, physical, emotional, learning, injury, accidental, or illness-related disability has challenged you. In what ways did you reach beyond your limitations?
• How has disability impacted your aging? Write about exploring bodily experiences or the will to survive and transcend the physical. Write a poem that expresses your life experience from the inside out, giving the reader a little window into what it is like to be you and differently able.
• Write about the experience of starting to think or see disability in a new way.

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Mairs, N. (1990). Carnal Acts: Essays. Boston: Beacon Press. pp. 81-96.

Northern, M. ( n.d.) Ten Poems to Kickstart Your Disability Lit Class. Retrieved March 13, 2014 from http://www.wordgathering.com/issue26/reading_loop/northen.html

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Debbie spent 30 years as a registered nurse. She became a certified applied poetry facilitator and journal-writing instructor in 2007. She is currently a student in the Johns Hopkins Science-Medical Writing program. Her publications have appeared in Journal of Poetry Therapy, Studies in Writing: Research on Writing Approaches in Mental Health, Women on Poetry: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing by Successful Women, Statement CLAS Journal, The Journal of the Colorado Language Arts Society, and Red Earth Review.

 

Have you ever worked on a story that you knew was tied into another story: one you didn’t want to write. One you have never wanted to write.

And then you wrote it.

Ultimately, it was the most vulnerable writing you’ve ever done.

The reward: Intuitive knowledge. Vulnerability. Writing that came from your body. Connecting seemingly disparate events.

Then you gave your story to an editor to line edit, only to have her do developmental editing, pulling your weaved stories apart. You clearly didn’t get what you asked for or thought you were going to get. Then you read comments, “I so love what you’ve done so far…your voice is wonderful. The images are strong; the emotions (realism) are powerful. I recommend starting here and going forward.” Maybe it’s not so strange that this scenario happened to me while writing this column. We’ve all been there.

Think about the last work-shopping group you were in or the last time a friend read your latest chapter or essay. We know we have to connect with ourselves when we write, but then we also have to learn to not take responses to our writing as personal. It’s most important to stay true to self, have your voice appear on every page, and continue to learn the craft and cultivate our writing skills, all while staying connected to our body.

Intellectually I know to feel is to be vulnerable.[i] Being vulnerable is a necessary part of opening to love and passion.[ii] And being vulnerable is, paradoxically, a type of strength. To be a good writer, to write what needed to be written, to tell the story I wanted to tell, I couldn’t escape vulnerability.

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light. ― Brené Brown

Brene Brown defines vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. To make real connection we have to be willing to open up. We have to allow ourselves to be seen. This is also true in our writing. Our writing can’t escape vulnerability if we commit to it on the page. The more we work on our connection with our bodies, the more vulnerable we can be in our writing. This is true both ways.

Perhaps learning the body, the science of it, the mechanics, is akin to the psychological quest to hold the dark places open, look into them, deprive them of their power. If I understand the ways in which a body can fail, will the dark places lose their fearfulness? Or, if I understand all the ways bodies fail, the myriad of ways in which we are frail and given to mechanical meltdown, facing my own physical breakdown won’t feel so lonely. So terrifyingly alone”[iii] (Zwartjes, p. 25).

The thing about vulnerability is that we often aren’t self-aware enough to navigate vulnerability, even if we are self-aware enough to know that we’re vulnerable. We can develop self-awareness by committing to a practice of mindful writing exercises that help us connect with our body and its vulnerabilities.

Exercise 1: Find a quiet place, lie flat or sit cross-legged and close your eyes. Scan your body. Locate points of tension. Consider why they are tight, then describe via writing.

Initially when I was writing my story I was tense, totally guarded. I noticed my shoulders were up by my ears. Turning my head from side to side alleviated the tightness in my neck. I found the courage to open up after setting intention to tell truths, especially the uncomfortable ones. It was a risk. It was awkward. I was scared. Somehow I was able to write through the tension.

Exercise 2: Describe a time when you felt guarded in a social situation. What did your body do? Where was it tense? Describe a time when you were open to a new idea, different perspective. How did your body receive this openness?

Exercise 3: Write about a time you dropped the invisible armor that shielded your heart and let the love of others penetrate you. Describe a time when your body felt fully relaxed. What physical sensations were you aware of? What/who was surrounding you?

 

There can be no vulnerability without risk;

There can be no community without vulnerability;

There can be no peace, and ultimately

No life, without community. – M. Scott Peck

 

We can reflect on our experiences and explore more deeply our physical body and vulnerabilities in our writing.

 

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability. To be alive is to be vulnerable. 

Madeleine L’Engle

 

How does vulnerability feel? For me, it is uncomfortable and uncertain. Vulnerability was where courage and fear met in my weaved stories.

Only you can write your stories. Be patient and kind with yourself.

 

The strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility -Paulo Coelho

 

Exercise 4: Write about your softer, more receptive side.

Exercise 5: Describe a time you took an emotional risk or felt emotionally exposed. Write about a time you were willing to place your private and innermost workings in another’s hands. (For example, a time of sexual desire, self-disclosure, standing up for yourself). Write about the vulnerability of your flesh (initiating sex, exercising in public). Write about how you are worthy of connection to your body.

Vulnerability is based on mutuality and requires boundaries and trust. Vulnerability is another way of saying; “I trust you and I feel safe with you.”[iv] Writing with an ongoing connection between our body and ourselves is something that we can nurture and grow. Trusting your body is about trusting yourself. Writers trust their audience. For a reader to place trust in your hands is humbling.

 

We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.

 

Exercise 6: What are you most afraid of when you write? Write for ten minutes after reading this quote from Brene Brown: “The one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we’re not worthy of love and belonging.”

Sometimes it’s awkward to write openly about certain issues, but if we do it could ultimately be rewarding. Love, imagination, and creativity are intimately connected.

 

What makes you vulnerable makes you beautiful. ― Brené Brown

 

Find that beauty in you.

Final exercise: What is the one thing you would never write about?

Now write it.

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[i] Brown, Brene. (2012). Daring Greatly: How the Courage to be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead. New York, New York: Penguin Group.

[ii] Groover, R. J. (2011). Powerful and Feminine: How to Increase Your Magnetic Presence & Attract the Attention You Want. Deep Pacific Press. p. 171.

[iii] Zwartjes, A. (2012). Detailing Trauma. A Poetic Anatomy. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

[iv] Groover, R. J. (2011). Powerful and Feminine: How to Increase Your Magnetic Presence & Attract the Attention You Want. Deep Pacific Press. p. 175

 

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Debbie spent 30 years as a registered nurse. She became a certified applied poetry facilitator and journal-writing instructor in 2007. She is currently a student in the Johns Hopkins Science-Medical Writing program. Her publications have appeared in Journal of Poetry Therapy, Studies in Writing: Research on Writing Approaches in Mental Health, Women on Poetry: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing by Successful Women, Statement CLAS Journal, The Journal of the Colorado Language Arts Society, and Red Earth Review.